President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday ordered the Russian authorities to move towards ending the anti-terror operation in Chechnya that has been in place for the last decade.

He ordered the national anti-terror committee to consider the future of the regime, which was put in place as Moscow was starting its second war against separatists in the Muslim Caucasus region in 1990.

“I propose that the national anti-terror committee considers the question about the anti-terror operation and takes the necessary decisions,” Medvedev said in comments broadcast on state television.

Turkish secularism on the ropes. Sharia is advancing in what is always held out to be that exemplary beacon of democracy in the Islamic world, Turkey. The reasons why Sharia supremacists are advancing there have not — unsurprisingly — been sufficiently explored by Western analysts, who of course dismiss out of hand the appeal of a call to restore Islamic authenticity.

“Erdogan Set for Election Win That May Revive Tension Over Islam,” by Ben Holland for Bloomberg, March 27

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is set to win a fresh mandate from voters that may embolden his challenge to the country’s military and courts, which see him as an Islamist threat to Turkey’s secular system.

A Turkish officer was arrested Wednesday in connection with suspected extrajudicial killings in the country’s predominantly Kurdish southeast in the 1990s.

A court in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, issued the arrest warrant for the officer, Col. Cemal Temizoz, pending a trial.

Colonel Temizoz served near the town of Cizre, about 40 miles from the Iraqi border in Turkey’s southeast, between 1993 and 1996, when hundreds of Kurdish civilians and activists were said to have been killed by security forces with links to the military.

A Christian minister who has had heated arguments with Muslims on his TV Gospel show has been brutally attacked by three men who ripped off his cross and warned: ‘If you go back to the studio, we’ll break your legs.’

The Reverend Noble Samuel was driving to the studio when a car pulled over in front of him. A man got out and came over to ask him directions in Urdu.

Mr Samuel, based at Heston United Reformed Church, West London, said: ‘He put his hand into my window, which was half open, and grabbed my hair and opened the door.
He started slapping my face and punching my neck. He was trying to smash my head on the steering wheel.

Thousands of Protestants and Catholics united with their political and security leaders Friday at the funeral of a policeman — shot by IRA dissidents in what mourners prayed would mark the end of Northern Ireland’s ”troubles.”

Constable Stephen Carroll, 48, was shot through the back of the head Monday as he sat in his patrol car. He was the first policeman killed here since 1998, the year of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday peace accord. Just two days earlier, dissidents gunned down two unarmed soldiers outside their base, the first killing of British troops here since 1997.